Hitting the Accelerator on Our RV

Kevin Connor
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Mar 1, 2019

Do you feel attached to RV? So do we! We’ve loaded it up with lots of features and covered a lot of miles over the years. We’ve even taken a few unexpected side trips. This year, we’re back on the freeway with a full tank of gas, and we thought you might like to know where we’re driving things.

You may not have noticed, but starting in April of last year we began a more frequent cycle of updates than in the past, delivering seven releases in less than a year. Just last week we released an update that upgraded our EXR support to version 2.3 and improved our rendering of fine details for images viewed at less than full resolution. Past releases have addressed a wide variety of bugs and workflow issues while also adding support for some new codecs and the latest AJA SDK. More importantly, we’ve established a release rhythm which we intend to maintain in the year ahead, but with a little more heft to the releases.

Those of you who develop your own custom extensions to RV will be happy to know we’re finally hard at work moving to the Qt5 framework, which will bring with it more modern web support capabilities and PySide2. We’re also lining up some additional codecs to support, so that we can keep up with your format needs.

There are three pillars to our development focus for the year ahead, and beyond as well:

Performance: You keep throwing bigger and more complex media at RV, so we’ll continue to find ways to accelerate our performance so as to handle challenging content more smoothly. And we’ll also find ways to produce the highest-quality and most accurate display of that content.

Compatibility: Formats are always changing, both with revisions to existing formats and entirely new formats that gain workflow acceptance. But we also need to maintain compatibility with the whole ecosystem RV occupies, from development frameworks like Qt to specialized hardware needs like AJA and Blackmagic.

Reliability: Our clients push RV into the most demanding uses, which means, well...they have a tendency to find where things might break. Thus, we will continue to devote a portion of our attention to monitoring the issues that our clients report and resolving all of the most important issues.

What’s not on this list? Any big changes to the user experience. Our focus will be on taking the RV you already love and just making it work better and better.

Lastly, we must emphasize that while RV remains important to a variety of Shotgun workflows, we have no intention of limiting RV access to just Shotgun subscribers. RV has always been a general-purpose media tool that can be integrated into any workflow, and we have no intention of changing that.

Thanks again for your loyalty to RV, and we aim to continue earning it every day.